Happy Bicycle Day!
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey, Brooke. Hi, Micah. Okay, so iOS, the Apple operating system, has made some changes recently that I think...

may make it harder for people to listen to on the media. And I've just learned this, but most of our podcast listeners listen on the Apple Podcast app, and so it's likely affecting them. Yeah, I listen on that. I want to walk you through how to change a setting that will greatly improve your on-the-media listening experience. Okay, but you know how I get when it comes to technology. Yeah.

This is easy, I promise. So go to the podcast app. I'm on it. Go to your favorite podcast on the media. All right. And in the top right-hand corner, do you see a checkmark or do you see plus follow? Plus follow. Click plus follow. It turns to a checkmark. That's how you know that you have it right. Mm-hmm.

Which means that if you're out and about and you decide you want to listen to On the Media, it will be there waiting for you. You don't have to stream it. You don't have to use data to download the episode. All right, all right, all right. I'm sold. Okay, good. Very good. Okay, but that's not why we're here.

No. We're here to talk about Bicycle Day. Yes, Bicycle Day. It was when the inventor of LSD rode home on his bicycle inadvertently and unknowingly high. Yes, April 19th, 1943, and the scientist was Albert Hoffman. Mm-hmm. And...

I'll be honest, this is an excuse for us to rerun one of my favorite episodes that you and I worked on together in 2018. I know, you were so young then. That's true. Arguably, I'm still so young. But at the time, I was... You were still in short pants. Hey, you must not spend enough time with me in person. I still wear the short shorts.

This was a story that I pitched and produced for you about Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A friend of mine, River Donahay, who's a writer and filmmaker. He also made a recent podcast called Good Cult in which he investigates the cult that he grew up in. And he came to me with a hard drive filled with audio recordings.

the original never before aired on radio recordings of ken kesey's never made documentary about his road trip across the united states from california to new york that was uh documented in tom wolf's great book electric kool-aid acid test yes the multi-colored day glowed bus and

And this sent us down kind of a fun rabbit hole where we ended up thinking, well, maybe we should talk to Tom Wolfe himself. I reached out to him and ended up scoring us an invite to his penthouse on the Upper East Side overlooking Central Park. Yes, I remember it well. It was full of like round mahogany bookcases and orchids, you

you know, kind of hepa white furniture, books everywhere, art on the walls. It was quite the place. It was. I was taking pictures. We could post a picture. Oh, yeah. Well, definitely. Yeah. Follow on the media on Instagram to see some of these vintage photos. What was your experience interviewing him?

Well, I have had some experience talking to very old people. And you really have to meet them on their terms.

And it was very clear that there was only going to be a very little bit that we could use. He couldn't speak that well. And actually, at the time, I don't think I appreciated the significance of us being there because we visited him on March 8th, 2018. And on May 14th, 2018, Tom Wolfe passed away. So that visit may very well have been the last chance

interview with him. Quite likely. And I'm glad we've got another excuse to run it. Listeners, enjoy! Kesey's story really starts in the late 50s when he was a graduate student at Stanford's creative writing program. River Donahay, a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn.

Up until that point, Kesey was sort of this all-American farm boy. He was a college jock. He married his high school sweetheart. He had a very wholesome childhood. But when he got to Stanford, he needed money to support his new family, so he got this job basically being a guinea pig for clinical drug trials in a nearby hospital. The drug trials at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital were marketed as research for treating mental illness,

But we know today that they were part of Project MKUltra, the CIA's mind control study. Kesey was given a few different drugs, an early antidepressant called IT290, a vomit-inducing antibiotic called DITRIM. And one of the pills was LSD. And so how did he feel on LSD?

Well, I mean, you got to put yourself in Kesey's shoes at that point, right? It's the end of the 50s. It's like Mad Men era. It's this like suburbs and housewives and like dad with the briefcase and the suit going off to work. It was a very like repressed time. There's a very narrow window of what was socially appropriate. And LSD cracked Kesey's brain open to all these new possibilities and new perspectives and new ways of viewing the world.

We actually have some audio from one of Kesey's first experiences with LSD in the Menlo Park Hospital. This was in 1959 or 60. Yeah. How are you feeling right now? I just seem to feel there's still some effect to the drive. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, he's in this little white box, this tiny little room in the hospital's mental ward. And he's sitting there taking this LSD and periodically orderlies and nurses are coming in and out, taking blood samples and urine samples. It was not really the ideal place to have an acid trip. It's quarter to one, and I'm high out of my mind. Such a good drug, in that I suddenly am filled with this great loving and understanding of people.

Nobody's going to get high unless they've got to rape somebody. They might go out and take a little girl by the hand and give her a bottle of flowers, but that would be all. So I say public support has to get behind it.

We need a huge missionary. We need a messiah. We need a huge missionary. We need a messiah. Yeah. I think Kesey really had the spiritual awakening. I think he saw that there was a path to go down. That all these structures that he had sort of accepted as reality weren't really reality. And there were all these different options out there that he had...

the ability to go explore and sort of figure out where he fit within those. He found himself catalyzed creatively by those sessions in Menlo Park. In doing these drug tests and in experiencing LSD, Kesey had an idea. Oh, naturally, I'll go get a job at the mental hospital as a night watchman and, you know, sneak some of that acid out for my friends back at home. And also, as a night watchman, have a lot of time to sit and write.

And that's where, late One Night High on psychedelics, he has this vision of one institution patient called Chief Broom, this like hulking Native American man. And he just starts writing and he...

writes five pages, six pages of this book that ends up becoming One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A humanizing portrait of mental illness and civil disobedience. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, released in 1962, made Kesey a literary sensation at the age of 27. It also boosted his profile as a burgeoning acid messiah.

a devoted entourage that he would later dub the Merry Pranksters, began to coalesce around him. Kesey took some of the money from One Fill of the Cuckoo's Nest and bought this house in La Honda, California, out in the woods.

And that house in La Honda became sort of this proto-commune with people flowing in and out. And he also had the LSD, and he was throwing really good parties out there in the woods. So people naturally gravitated towards him. Among the merry pranksters, Neil Cassidy, a speed freak and the muse of the beat generation, inspiring the main character in On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and the heartthrob vagabond in Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl.

Neil Cassidy, secret hero of these poems. Joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots and diner backyards. It was Cassidy who would ultimately drive that legendary bus. To get into the bus trip, we have to start in 1963. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became a Broadway play starring Kirk Douglas. And so Kesey and a couple of his friends drove out to New York to go check the play out. And...

On their way back... President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were shot from ambush today in a motorcade. Both are still alive but in very serious condition in the emergency room at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas. They're sharing this very intimate moment in this collective space in the car passing through America in the small towns. It gave Kesey this understanding of the road trip as a quintessentially American experience.

And so once they got back to La Honda, he said, let's go back next year. 1964 World's Fair is going to be happening in New York about the same time as the publication of his follow-up to One Flew the Cuckoo's Nest, this book, Sometimes a Great Notion. Unfortunately, there's so many people hanging out around Kesey's house, you know, they can't all fit in the station wagon, so they need something a little bigger. And that's where the bus comes in.

It's this 1938 International Harvester school bus. They bought it for like $1,500 from a guy who had 11 kids, and he had sort of outfitted it so his kids could sleep in it. Kesey and his friends cut a turret in the ceiling and put this big deck on the roof and wired it for sound. There's the famous paint job. They had a bunch of Dayglo paint floating around.

And somebody decided to throw a big smear of orange on there. And somebody else decided, well, we'll add a little red and add a little blue and a little green. You know, the thing with LSD is that it doesn't really inspire great fine motor skills. So by the time they were done, it was like somebody ate a bunch of markers and threw them up or something. You have two documents that depict this trip.

One is the electric Kool-Aid acid test, Tom Wolfe's. At the time that electric Kool-Aid acid test finally came out, the hippie movement was in full swing. I guess the book functioned as this behind-the-scenes look at how everything started, how the hippie movement became what it was. Kesey taught the hippies how to be hippies. Before the phrase hippie existed, before anyone knew what LSD was,

I mean, they were in the bus and people didn't even know what to make of them. People thought maybe they were in the circus or like Escape from the Loony Bin or something. What did Tom Wolfe make of them? Tom Wolfe saw that Kesey was this quintessential American figure. A little P.T. Barnum, a little spiritual guru. We actually spoke to Tom Wolfe. His favorite saying was, "You're either on the bus or off the bus."

If you were off the bus, it meant you were out of the greatest experience human beings could have. Kesey was striving to become the leader of the entire psychedelic movement. What appealed to me the most was just, this was newsworthy. It was gold for me. I mentioned that there were two documents. The other one, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters documented their travels for a movie that they never released.

He had this concept of everybody's movies, that everybody is living out a script. Kesey believed that acid could serve as a way of recognizing your script and a way to break character, to live freely in the moment. I feel like you only come to this movie once, and if you don't get something rewarding out of every minute you're sitting there, then you're blowing your ticket. ♪

We got hold of the Keezy Tapes, most of which have never been heard by the public. And let me tell you, a band of proto-hippies cruising through the South drinking acid-laced Kool-Aid in a psychedelic school bus with a manic Neil Cassidy at the wheel, it all sounds just about as you'd imagine it.

And we're just barrel-assing across the desert and Gasty's got his shirt off and he's just sweating and sweating and sweating and he's just talking. My merry band of pranksters won't be lugging around in the dirt. Come on, come on. No, no, none of this misery stuff. Come on, this is the merry gang. God, look at it. Look at that. Get that. Hey, take a picture of that.

Out of the bus. Out of the bus. Yes, my children. Yes, my princes. Reaching New York was their final destination. They were really expecting this hero's welcome. And first, Cassidy sets up this party with Kerouac. And Keezy, of course, idolizes Kerouac. But once they got to this party, it just didn't work. Kerouac was, you know...

Pretty late in his life and an alcoholic. I've seen film of that. He looks very glum, almost sour. And then after that, they drive up to visit Timothy Leary, a former Harvard academic. He's kind of an acid philosopher. Turn off your mind. Relax. Float downstream.

It was supposed to be, at least in Kesey's mind, a meeting of the foremost psychedelic experimenter of the East and the West. But it didn't work out like that. No. Timothy Leary was in this big mansion in Millbrook with rolling hills and stone bridges. Sounds perfect. It was lovely. But Kesey and his friends roll up throwing smoke bombs off the top of the roof and...

all the members of Leary's group just sort of ran inside scared. Leary himself was just coming down off of a psychedelic trip and was in a very peaceful place and didn't really want to be involved with all that raucous energy that Kesey and his friends brought along.

And they go back to La Honda and start trying to cut together the movie that they shot. What they would do is every week they would cut the footage together, and then on Saturday they would have a screening of the week's cut. These big parties became very unwieldy until finally Kesey decided, okay, my family's living here, I have a couple of young kids, maybe we should find another place to screen the movie. And out of that came these things called the acid tests.

What was an acid test? I've never been clear on that. Well, again, the pranksters defy definition a little bit. Everything that Kesey was prototyping at La Honda, this sort of communal experience and this proto-hippie lifestyle, like, the acid tests were the opportunity for him to bring that into public. It was like a church group, like the early Christians, who were trying to spread their message publicly.

Wild multimedia experiences around the San Francisco Bay Area. This band, the Warlocks, would play before they changed their name to the Grateful Dead. And early psychedelic visuals like that oil and water projections and strobe lights. Of course, the warlocks would play.

Kesey was attracting the attention of the police. LSD was still legal in the mid-60s, so the cops eventually pinned him with a marijuana charge. And since that was his second marijuana charge, he was facing five years in prison with no chance of parole. And in typical prankster fashion, Kesey hatched a plan to fake his own death and go on the run to Mexico. And did it work? Well...

The run to Mexico was successful. Even in the suicide note that Kesey wrote, he said in parentheses, like, I don't think anyone's actually going to believe this, but I'm going to give it a try. He had one of his family members that looked like him drive around the Bay Area and then go up to a cliff

and throw Kesey's signature boots in the water and leave the suicide note. I don't know if it really threw the cops off the scent very long, but it gave Kesey enough time to make it across the Mexico border. Kesey fled to Mexico in January 1966 and spent the next eight months as a fugitive, well aware that he was being tracked by the FBI.

Meanwhile, word had spread about the movement he had helped start as kids from all across the country flocked to hate Ashbury, where he'd staged many acid-laced happenings. They were in search of what he created, whether they knew it or not. While he was gone, it took shape without him.

And while he was in Mexico, Kesey sort of came to this realization that he had gotten everything that he could from LSD. That that awakening consciousness that he got, like, it was awake. And to have it be sustainable, he had to find sort of a chemical-free solution.

psychedelic experience. In October 1966, Kesey was picked up by the FBI outside of San Francisco. He struck a deal with local law enforcement promising to hold an acid graduation, a public renunciation of LSD. Almost a year before the Summer of Love, this graduation was a radical notion.

Perhaps too radical. He may have gotten out of jail, but the followers that he had inspired had sort of grown up without him and weren't really keen on the idea of stopping taking drugs because they liked the drugs. I think that the moment that the hippie movement started

refuse to give up acid and follow Kesey further, it's the moment that the movement stalled. And I think whatever last vestiges of the hip movement still exist today are still stuck there in that same place, you know, sort of leaning on the crutch of drugs. Why do you care so much about Ken Kesey? So I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is where Kesey sort of retired to with the pranksters in the 70s. And Eugene is a place where

fundamentally changed by Kesey. It's sort of the last enclave of the hippie ideals. I mean, my name is River. I sort of come from it. And I come from a different piece of it. My parents were more at this like new age, personal growth movement in the 80s. They're a full generation after Kesey. That's right. But some of that comes from Kesey. I think that creating this heavy, deep and real emotional group work without drugs is sort of what this personal growth movement in the 80s was also attempting to do.

My father gave me a copy of electrochloric acid tests when I was in sixth grade, and he said, here's the history of your home. My mother wasn't so happy with that. Kesey said the acid tests, the noisy parties fueled by LSD, were a way to measure a person's willingness to discover what was out there if you moved beyond the norm. It was a test, and there were people that passed and there were people that didn't pass. To give you an example of somebody who passed...

Some businessman just walking around the street came in for a buck. He got to see us make all our noise and the dead make all their noise and anything else that happened. This guy was in a suit, had an umbrella, and he got the customary cup of stuff. About midnight, you could see him really get ripped. Probably never been anything but drunk on beer.

But he looked around, saw all these strange people, and he looked down, and the spotlight was showing down on him. He saw a shadow. He'll stand up straight, put that umbrella over his shoulder, and he says, The king walks. The king turns around. Now the king will dance. ♪

50 years after the electric Kool-Aid acid test, we're still being tested. Connecting to something bigger, something beyond what seems to be a profoundly abnormal kind of norm, is back. Or maybe it's being fueled by the realization that the norm was never normal, or shouldn't have been. Anyway, it's creeping back. And so is LSD.

if only to make moving beyond the norm a little easier. Much thanks to filmmaker and writer River Donahay, who brought us the story and then talked to us about it.

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the Science Friday team has been reporting high-quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies.

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